Finished up the October 1st edition of The Mortgageland Journal this past weekend. I also completed our Press Releases page for our main website. The historical timeline of the company contained on it, I feel many visitors to our website will appreciate reading. When we were doing retail originations, the general public loved that page, they looked at it all the time - therefore I assume industry people should care about that sort of stuff too.


Today I was reading the Los Angeles Dodger's homepage and saw the title of an article which said: Dodgers officially out of race - don't know who wrote it, but that's been the case for some time, maybe the author doesn't follow the team like I have. GAWD willin' they'll DUMP Manager Grady Little pretty soon now.

One of our Mentors sent this to me yesterday: http://data.nationalmortgagenews.com/columns/hearing/ - "As I recall -- and I'm going by memory -- the broker movement started in the wake of the S&L crisis 20 years ago. When hundreds of thrifts went bust, laid-off loan officers became "freelancers" for Anaheim Savings, Guardian Savings, Countrywide and others. If you have any recollections about the evolution of brokers drop me an e-mail at Paul.Muolo@SourceMedia.com "

As it so happens, I saw that Friday and had already replied to him (I've known Paul for many years BTW).

I believe the mortgage broker beginning started quite some time ago, here in Southern California I for one remember they were around when I first started in this industry 41 years ago for The Mother Company (in fact, on our wholesale side, we did a lot of business with them in those early years). Come to think of it, when I left and went out on my own in 1979, at first I was a mortgage broker and brokered mortgage loans back to my former employer! I also think they began as a real presence, at different points in time in other States, so maybe in your State they were in deed a result of the later S&L crisis as Paul suggests.

If you have anything to add, why not post it HERE since I'm told Paul is a reader of our BLOG!

Before we started up the Secret! University learning center, we had a long-running Press Release page which detailed the adventures of the compnay as it grew. I remember from the web stats back then, that the borrowing public clicked that page quite a bit, spent 4+ minutes on it, and enjoyed learning about our history.

Yesterday, I cut & pasted several of those older press releases (those that seemed somewhat relevant to today) and fired up an all new Press Release page. I am hopeful visitors to our main website will enjoy it.


BTW, our Dodger's SUCK - they have made me cry for the last time this season. I prey they toss the Manager out on his ear in the off season, too many good people out there who could do a better job: Like who? Mike Sosa or Kevin Kennedy ... or real more world Dusty Baker!

A negative idea has been generating in my brain about industry specific internet discussion boards, that's going to be the subject of our lead article in the upcoming October 1st issue of The Mortgageland Journal. I have visited, read, and posted myself probably 10,000+ times in these boards over the past half dozen years. In addition to the logical math that I have come up with; as a long time advertiser in one of them, I got to see the inside numbers of posters vs overall membership vs reader/viewers of information in them. They have a large and wide reaching effect into our industry, and I'm coming to believe it's often been detrimental to the business.

Several minor points I have seen are 1). people ask question in them, and then rely upon the responses from strangers, as being the correct answer to their needs (when frequently I see the replies are incorrect), 2), many people substitute these boards for their industry training and education, and the biggest problem I see 3). those who provide answers more often than not are ENABLING others with help which they should have never had easy access to.

The Secret! University learning center had it's 5th Anniversary celebration this past Saturday, and I almost forgot to mention it to anyone outside the company, sorry!

At the end of the first full week of the month, our Mentor program page came in at 29.556% of all the pages viewed on our website; tells me lots of people are looking for some guidance (I would be embarassed to tell you how many of them actually pulled the trigger to engaged one our our teachers though). The number one page looked at by our website visitors came in at 49.261% - our latest 'Lesson for the Times' CD Lesson (bottom of the page).

As I speak with other industry trainers, I hear the same theme, loads of 'lookers' and few people willing to actually spend money for training and industry education. It's my guess they will make the wrong move by seeking help by networking with colleagues, or look for free answers on the internet from strangers inside chat rooms, or industry discussion boards.

Given everything that's happening out there these days, one would think they would be smarter than that -- I hope so, we've got lots of good stuff available.

Ya know some of these marketeers are becoming a real problem for me; I think it may be time for me to wear Depends before I turn on the computer these days!

Here's why. I just now saw a press release about this one company, in part it said: "... a leading single-family super-prime residential mortgage lender focused principally on the jumbo and super-jumbo segment of the adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) market ...."

It's stuff like that, that makes me wet my pants laughing - see what I mean? Those guys gotta be teasing me, right? They're so wonderful, they brag about 'putting the wood' to (not ordinary prime but -->) super-prime customers with their ARM products ... hahahahaha.

That's just tooooo funny for me

Good Morning! It's gonna be another boiling hot day in So Cal today. I get a real kick out of the weatherman on the news, they've been telling me, here at the beach city where I live, it will be around 80 degrees! hahahah. Friday 2:30 on my way back from lunch, it was 105 degrees in my driveway, yesterday @3:30 (late lunch) it was only 1o1! ... going to the movie show today at 12:30 and intend to stay there for probably 3 different shows, at least it will be cool there! (bet it's been more than 50 years since I snuck from one movie to another - today I'll keep my eyes out for the RESPA Police!!)

Some of you have have followed the web visitor stats I revealed about our entire website earlier in August, well month's over now. A full 20.5% of our overall website visitors looked at our Mentor page, with our Certified Mortgage Professional program coming in at 19% (our average visitor spends more than 6 minutes on our site - I like that number!) ... especially considering 85+% overall who visited us (unique visitors) came to us from organic searches on google, yahoo, etc., tells me people are looking for more and more ways to survive this industry climate, that's a good sign to me. I hope we can help YOU tomorrow!